Axiom Math scored 120/120 on the 2025 Putnam exam, beating the best LLM (DeepSeek at 103/120) and the best human contestant (110/120).

“The best LM deepseek got 103 points out of a 120 point exam. The best human obviously we now know is a student from either MIT or Chicago. We don't know which one because they don't announce the top five winner score got 110 and we got 120.”

GRPO became dominant not due to algorithmic novelty but because DeepSeek did the scaling engineering and shipped a working artifact model that validated it.

“I think the reason GRPO specifically like that algorithm and that acronym like, you know, very concretely took off was not necessarily because it was like a big quantum leap on what came before. It was because DeepSeek did a lot of engineering work around actually scaling it and released an actual artifact model that worked really well with it.”

DeepSeek delivered GPT-4-level performance at 1/600th the inference cost of GPT-4.

“Deep Seek, for example, on GPT-4 was 1/600 the cost.”

DeepSeek demonstrates that natural language verification with meta-verification is sufficient for mathematical reasoning at scale, without requiring formal proof systems like Lean.

“It's interesting that natural language verification with some sort of meta-verification seems to work so far in the published literature.”

DeepSeek uses expert parallelism rather than pipeline parallelism for frontier-scale inference, a deployment choice worth tracking as MoE models proliferate.

“The DeepSeek paper reports what they do, which is that they just do a lot of expert parallelism.”

DeepSeek's widely cited $15 million training cost claim for building an OpenAI competitor was not accurate, according to Jason Lemkin.

“What did Deep Seek claim their training model was back when it launched? 15 million to train an open AI competitor. Like of course it wasn't true.”

Roman Chernin on Nebius stock dropping 40% the same week the company had its best sales week ever during the DeepSeek moment.

“Nebul stock went down 40% in one week or so in February I think it was February or March 2024 2025 and anecdotal story the same the same exact week we probably had the best week in sales.”

DeepSeek did not break AI scaling laws. It combined existing algorithms to reduce token costs but left the underlying scaling trajectory intact.

“Deepseek wasn't it obviously >> deepse was >> was not it. It did not break on scaling law.”

Nebius stock fell 40% in one week during the DeepSeek moment in early 2025, while simultaneously recording its best-ever sales week.

“Nebul stock went down 40% in one week or so in February I think it was February or March 2024 2025 and anecdotal story the same the same exact week we probably had the best week in sales.”

Banning DeepSeek in the US would likely accelerate global adoption of DeepSeek models and Huawei chips outside American borders.

“If we ban it boy it's just going to one you know even more people working with Huawei chip and deepseek trying to optimize it. But two, you know, in this world we've created where there's so much animosity, I think people would be glad to use it in these other countries.”